Chapter 6: The Drive Up

The car smells like new leather and whatever cologne James wore to the office. Nadia adjusted the seat for the third time, though it wasn't actually uncomfortable. She was just looking for something to do with her hands besides exist in the passenger seat for four hours straight.

James pulled out of the parking garage with smooth precision. Of course he was a good driver.

"Bluetooth is set up," he said. "Your phone or mine?"

"Yours," Nadia said immediately. "Educational purposes. I'm building a psychological profile."

"No, you're not."

"Partially lying, yes. Mostly I want ammunition."

He didn't smile, but his hands adjusted on the wheel like he was considering it. "I listen to music like a normal person."

"That's what someone who listens to nothing but financial podcasts would say."

"I don't listen to financial podcasts."

"Smooth jazz?"

"No."

"Yacht rock? Heavy metal? Ambient sounds for executive stress management?"

"You're going to try every genre until something lands."

"I have four hours," Nadia said. "I'm patient."

He picked up his phone from the cup holder and handed it back without another word. Nadia scrolled through his Spotify expecting—she wasn't sure what. Someone who looked like James should listen to something that confirmed what he looked like. Classical, maybe. Or nothing at all, just podcasts and earnings calls.

Instead: playlists labeled "Saturday morning" and "running—try to kill yourself" and one simply called "the playlist." She opened it. The National. Bon Iver. Radiohead, early Arctic Monkeys next to Stevie Wonder and an embarrassing amount of Fleetwood Mac.

"'Rhiannon,'" she said. "Multiple times. This song appears five times across different lists."

"Good song."

"That's not a defense, that's an obsession."

She queued it up anyway. The opening guitar started—that haunting progression, that voice—and James merged onto the highway with the kind of focus that suggested military operations. The song filled the car. Nadia watched Chicago blur past the window. She'd listened to this song probably three thousand times. It had the kind of staying power of things that actually cut through.

"So," she said, "family reunion protocol. What am I walking into? And don't say 'a normal family reunion.'"

"Normal family reunion," he said anyway.

"Specific, please. Angry exes? Someone who gets drunk and cries about their divorce?"

"My stepfather's brother gets competitive about golf. Caroline keeps score about everything and pretends she doesn't. Richard's knee makes stairs difficult, and he makes the same joke about it at every gathering. Laugh the first time and you'll be fine."

"And your mother?"

"She collects details about people. She's going to ask you things that seem casual but aren't."

"Like you," Nadia said.

"Not like me."

She looked at him. "You absolutely collect details about people. I've seen you at events. You notice everything and say nothing and file it somewhere."

He glanced at her briefly. "You've been thinking about my filing habits."

"I've been thinking about what you wrote down. About me." She kept her voice level. "It's strange behavior. That's just objectively true."

"I notice things about people," he said. Simple. Not defensive, not apologetic. "It's not secret and it's not malicious. It's just how I see."

Nadia felt something catch in her chest at the plainness of it. James Whitmore was a person who noticed things about people. He'd probably been doing it since childhood, collecting details like other people collected objects.

"What do you notice about me?" The question came out before she could stop it.

He was quiet for long enough that she thought he might not answer.

"That you assume everyone wants something from you," he said finally. "That you listen better than you let on. That you have a habit of repeating the last thing someone says when you're uncomfortable. And you're uncomfortable most of the time, especially around me."

"Okay, that's full-spectrum creepy, actually."

"You asked."

"I asked rhetorically."

He didn't respond, and Nadia turned back to the window, aware of her own smile. It was there in the corner of her mouth, uninvited and difficult to dismiss.

They drove through the city and out toward open highway. Around the ninety-minute mark, something in her nervous system let go. The car was warm. The music wasn't terrible. James didn't try to fill the silence, which meant she didn't have to perform her way through it. She could just exist next to him without commentary or interpretation.

She scrolled through his playlists without looking for anything specific. A playlist called "concentration" that was all classical. One called "angry" that was surprisingly soft guitar and female vocals. One called—she stopped completely.

"Nadia."

The playlist was labeled with her name. Created six months ago, if she opened the details. She hovered her thumb over it without clicking.

"Don't," James said quietly, though she hadn't said anything.

"Don't what?"

"Overthink the playlist labeled 'Nadia.'"

"Okay, no." She pulled her hand back from the phone anyway. "That's the literal definition of overthinking—a playlist with your fake fiancée's actual name on it."

"It was created six months ago."

"James."

"Nadia."

She put the phone down. She couldn't look at him. Couldn't think about what it meant that he'd been making playlists with her name on them while she was busy assuming he barely noticed her from four desks over.

The highway stretched ahead. They were past the city now, into the flat stretch of Illinois where the sky had started to turn gold at the edges. The last hour of late afternoon doing something complicated with the light. Nadia felt her shoulders drop, the tension she'd been holding slowly releasing into the leather seat.

A song came on that she recognized immediately. Old. A little sad. The kind of thing that sounds like late-night introspection written by someone who understood what they were writing about. It was one of hers—something she'd had on repeat through a bad breakup three years ago, the kind of song that knew her inside and out.

She didn't expect James to even know it existed.

He started singing.

Quietly, like he wasn't aware he was doing it—his voice just joining the original track naturally, low and slightly rough around the edges, his eyes on the road. It wasn't a trained voice. It was fine, it was better than fine, it was actually very good. But that wasn't the point.

The point was that he knew this song. Knew it well enough to sing it without thinking, his attention split between the highway and the music. Knew it well enough that it had clearly meant something to him at some point. Something real.

She catalogued it. Stored it in the same drawer where she'd filed he knows the color teal and he built a proposal story around things he had no right to know. James Whitmore listened to heartbreak songs. He drove four hours to a family obligation humming melancholy at the edges of his breath, and he did it like no one was watching.

The song ended. She didn't acknowledge it. Didn't acknowledge that she'd heard him or that she'd noticed or that she was equally complicit now in this strange symmetry of observation. He'd been cataloguing her for six months. She'd been cataloguing him for approximately two hours and already had more than she knew what to do with.

The highway kept unfolding.

His phone was still in her lap. She'd set it down after the playlist, after he'd said don't, and she'd listened, and that had felt like the right call. But the name was still there. Still just sitting in the list between "angry" and "concentration" like it belonged. Like it had always been there.

She picked the phone up again. Scrolled to it.

Her thumb hovered over the play button.